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Hand-Drawn Map of Medieval China

Hello folks,

This is a map that I drew in Spring 2011 for a history course titled "Medieval Travelers' to China" at San Francisco State University. Although I do some professional art now and do not consider this piece up to par with my current standards, I really loved creating it and it certainly impressed the instructor! All of the locations mentioned are based on places discussed in the medieval sources we read as coursework. All of the line work was laid in pencil and then gone over with black and red ink (dipped, not fountain) and the coloring done by pencil. It is 17.5x12" in size. Figured I'd give it a share since I'm excited to be on board here and contribute what I may. Thanks for looking!

-Gerhard von Liebau

Higher resolution photos can be viewed at the Flickr set for this map, located here.

Thanks for the replies! I agree that the rays around the outer groups look a bit awkward, but there was an historic reasoning behind using them. The Chinese viewed the populated regions outside of the empire to be worthy of little attention, and the obscurity of where these "barbaric" peoples lived was what I was trying to give a sense of with the use of the widespread and non-specific ray pattern. It is a bit jarring, alas.

All of the place names and peoples mentioned on the map correlated to those introduced in the coursework for the class and had to be discussed in a separate part of the assignment. The Vietnamese were never mentioned in the class, though they would have been independent of Chinese rule for several centuries by the end of the class's covered period (roughly 600-1700 CE). Not to mention the bottom of my map literally cuts off most of historic Vietnam anyway.